


All Our Broken Plans

by sixbeforelunch



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: Alcohol, Friendship, Gen, Slice of Life, Space Stations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-05
Updated: 2018-01-05
Packaged: 2019-02-19 09:02:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13120494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sixbeforelunch/pseuds/sixbeforelunch
Summary: Sam had a plan. It involved a low-key away mission. Taurik had a plan. It involved his brother. Neither of them get what they wanted.





	All Our Broken Plans

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Beatrice Otter for the beta. :)

The width of a forcefield was four micrometers. This fact came unbidden into Sam's mind as he stared at the gaping hole in the shuttle's hull and into the empty space beyond. Intellectually, he knew that the forcefield would keep the air in and the cosmic radiation out, and that it would hold as long as they had power. Emotionally, he wanted a whole lot more than four micrometers between himself and vacuum. He pushed the thought out of his head as best as he could and knelt down next to Taurik, who was lying on his back, half-inside of the wall. The air around them smelled like ozone and burnt plastic.

"Well?" Sam asked.

"Possibly," Taurik said, his voice muffled.

"Possibly?"

Taurik slid out far enough to look at Sam and rubbed two fingers against the bridge of his nose as if trying to ward off a headache. "Contrary to popular opinion, Starfleet engineers are not capable of conjuring complex machinery out of thin air. I cannot will a replacement CO2 scrubber into existence, and I am not at all certain that I can fix the one we have."

Sam stood up, wincing as he did so. He'd rolled his ankle during the mad scramble back to the shuttlecraft. He dropped into the pilot's chair and let his head fall back against the back of the chair, staring up at the ceiling. His hands were shaking. He didn't need a first aid file or a medical tricorder to diagnose himself. Rapid heartbeat, increased respiration, probably raised blood pressure. All pretty standard for when your away mission turns into a disaster, the uninhabited planet you're on turns out to be very much inhabited by angry people with large guns and no desire to talk things over, your shuttle is being held together with a forcefield, and a local star just started throwing out so much radiation that the subspace transmitter can't get a message out to your ship.

He took a deep breath and tried to get himself back under control. They'd made it off of the planet, they were alive, and they weren't being pursued. It had been a disaster, and he'd probably lost whatever little respect he'd managed to earn from Riker, but no one was dead.

Sam replayed the last 72 hours in his head. He'd been pathetically eager to take on the assignment when Riker had mentioned it, practically slobbering all over the man like an overeager puppy who had seen someone holding a treat. Take a shuttle to Verda V, and figure out why the unmanned science station was suddenly sending out reports full of extraneous data that no one had asked for. That was the entire job, but Sam had wanted to dance around in circles when Riker had given a little nod and told him to go find an engineer who could handle the actual work of digging into the computer diagnostics.

Taurik hadn't even wanted to come along. As a subspace engineer, it wasn't his area of expertise, although he was certainly capable of doing the work. But Sam had cajoled, telling him it would practically be a vacation since they would spend most of the time in the shuttle with no real work to do, and finally Taurik had conceded. The trip out had been fun. They'd played music, good music, not the staid classical that generally got played on the Enterprise. Contemporary Vulcan music had proved to be surprisingly upbeat. They'd played games--poker was boring with just two people, and Sam had no delusions about his ability to best Taurik in chess or kal-toh, but fizzbin... To be fair, Taurik had grasped the idea of making up rules as they went along more easily than Sam had thought he would, but Sam had still had the edge when it came to creative rule changes. Toward the end, Taurik had started to lose the odd tension he'd been carrying around for days.

And then they had landed to Verda V, and not twenty minutes later, people had started shooting at them. That had been less fun.

"So what's next?" Sam asked, mostly of himself.

Taurik stood up. "Whatever it is, it needs to happen in the next four hours and thirteen minutes."

"You can't fix the CO2 scrubber?" Sam asked.

"I cannot."

Sam stood up and pulled out the medkit. They both looked fine, but it was better to be safe. He handed the tricorder to Taurik, who scanned himself and appeared to be satisfied with his condition. Sam did likewise, but the tricorder just confirmed what he had already assumed. There was a lot of adrenaline in his system, and he had a mild sprain, but otherwise he was in good shape. His ankle hurt. It was nothing he couldn't work through, and first aid for joint injuries was generally just immobilization and painkillers. Sam decided to skip the immobilization, but swallowed a long-release analgesic. The bottle said they would work for 48 hours. Given the state of the CO2 scrubber, he just hoped he was alive long enough for them to wear off.

He carefully put the medkit back together and packed it away, hoping it wasn't obvious to Taurik that he was mostly stalling for time before he had to take charge. And he did have to take charge. This was his away mission, and he had to get them home safely. He tugged at the edge of his tunic and turned to face Taurik. "Okay. So we have about four hours until we run out of oxygen." 

It would take at least an hour before they were far enough away from the newly hyperactive star to get a message to the Enterprise. Based on where the Enterprise was supposed to be now, it would take a good forty one hours to get to each other even if both ships traveled at maximum warp--and maximum warp was a really bad idea when part of your hull had been replaced by a forcefield. Anything beyond warp 4 would put them at risk of what the manual called "loss of cohesion in the forcefield matrix" and Sam called "certain death". He and Taurik ran through a few scenarios using EVA suits and supplemental oxygen tanks, but all of them ended in a suffocating death in twelve to fifteen hours, even assuming they sedated themselves to use the minimum possible oxygen. He turned to the computer and pulled up a list of planets with breathable atmospheres that they could make in under four hours.

The options weren't good. There was one M-Class and one L-Class planet in range. The M-Class planet was inhabited by a pre-contact civilization that sufficiently advanced that the chances of being detected were higher than San was comfortable with. The L-Class planet was in the middle of an ice age.

The computer threw up one more possibility. White Star station, two hours and six minutes at warp 3. Taurik was reading over his shoulder. "This would appear to be our best option."

Sam skimmed the available data. By all indications, White Star was a miserable little backwater. Three centuries ago, it had been a state of the art station catering to the elite of the Styma Protectorate. But in the hundreds of years since its heyday, the protectorate had retrenched into a handful of planets and moons in a single system, and White Star had changed hands several times since then. The Ferengi had held it last, but a decade ago, they'd declared it unprofitable and pulled out, leaving it in the hands of a small governing counsel that was weak, but had enough just real power to keep the place from sliding into total anarchy.

It looked, in short, like the last place in the galaxy Sam wanted to spend the next few days, and also their only choice.

He set the course.

*

As soon as the radiation interference cleared, they got a signal out to the Enterprise. Riker's face had never been so welcome.

Sam gave him a quick run down of their situation, starting with landing on the delightful swamp of a planet. "...and so we're headed to White Star station," he finished.

Riker did not look happy, but he didn't immediately tell Sam what he should have done instead, so either Sam had taken the only option, or Riker was saving the lecture for later. There was a brief quiz about who, exactly, had been shooting at them. Thank the universe for Vulcan memories, because Sam's recollections amounted to "big" and "armed" and "wearing masks", but Taurik had memorized details of their armor and weapons, and tentatively identified them as Breen. The suggestion made Riker's eye twitch, but since none of this could possibly be Sam's fault--right?--he wasn't too worried about that. 

"Check in when you arrive at the station," Riker said, once he was satisfied with their report. "And every twelve hours after that. We should be able to pick you up in about two days."

Sam glanced at Taurik, who looked...pretty much like he always did, but Sam had gotten good at reading his expressionless expressions. He was about as happy about that as Sam was. But they couldn't exactly complain that the Enterprise didn't come racing to get them at Warp 9. And, Sam reminded himself firmly, they were alive. That was all that mattered.

The viewscreen snapped off, and Sam leaned back in his chair. Taurik was staring at the missing chunk of hull. "It'll hold," Sam said.

"Of course it will," Taurik said. There was a snappish edge to his voice. Sam would have chalked it up to the almost dying part of their adventure, but Taurik was Vulcan, and they generally didn't let a little thing like being shot at disturb their equilibrium.

"You okay?" Sam asked.

"I am fine."

"Are you sure? You seem...off." Had seemed off for a while, actually.

"I am fine," Taurik repeated, with a flicker of his eyebrow that told Sam he shouldn't ask a third time.

They sat in silence for a while. 

"Is it getting warm in here?" Sam asked. He was sweating through his uniform. He'd barely noticed it before, but the silence was the uncomfortable kind, and it was making him more antsy than usual.

"The environmental controls may need to be recalibrated," Taurik said.

"We're only forty minutes out from White Star. You can leave them." Taurik was probably enjoying the heat.

"For a crew composed of both Vulcans and Humans, Starfleet regulations require a temperature between 28 and 31 degrees," Taurik said, and popped a plate off of the wall. Too warm for the Human, too cold for the Vulcan, but no one would be completely miserable.

Taurik poked at the panel for a while, and Sam tuned out the beeping and whir of components until Taurik smacked the wall and said, not loudly, but forcefully, "Rish-kavarak!"

The computer helpfully translated. "May your water be poisoned and your children born without eyes."

Sam spun around in his chair and stared at Taurik, wide-eyed. He watched as Taurik carefully replaced the wall plate and sat down. "That's a nasty little curse you have there."

Taurik, not looking up from the computer, said, "The original meaning of the English word 'damn' is to consign someone to unimaginable torment for all eternity."

Sam snorted. "Fair point."

"I am unable to reset the environmental controls."

"It's fine. We're almost to White Star."

They dropped out of warp a few minutes later, and caught their first look of White Star in all its faded glory. 

It was shaped like a disc, and colored a sort of greenish-gray. Sam ran a detailed sensor sweep. The station was eight levels, and nearly a kilometer in diameter. Some areas didn't have power or even atmosphere. Huge solar panels were held by cables that extended out like tentacles from the center mass, but they were in terrible shape, with damage from debris strikes. A few had stopped working entirely. They looked like later additions. There was an antimatter reactor at the center of the station, but it was either broken or more likely out of fuel.

Twenty thousand people or more could have lived here once. Sam looked at the life signs reading. The sensors estimated a population of 2.7 thousand people. 

"Why does anyone live here?" Sam asked.

"I suspect it is either because they have no choice, or they cannot imagine any other way," Taurik said.

Sam stopped the shuttle about five hundred kilometers away from the station and tapped the comm line. "White Star station, this is the Federation shuttlecraft _Ja-Maru_. We are requesting permission to dock."

There was no response.

Sam tapped it again. "White Star station, please respond. We have system damage and limited oxygen. We require assistance and need permission to dock."

Nothing.

"Are they ignoring us?"

Taurik reached across and pulled up the sensor scan. "What frequency are you on?"

"Subspace K-band." It was the standard, and every subspace radio received it.

"Try radio."

" _Radio_ radio?"

"Yes."

Sam switched frequencies and repeated the message.

There was a long pause, and then a crackled voice came over the speaker. "Hello?"

"Hello," Sam said. "Can you hear me?"

"Who are you?"

Sam rolled his eyes and repeated, again, who they were and what they needed. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the oxy meter. They were still okay, but if they couldn't dock here, they were in serious trouble. He rubbed his temples and tried to stay calm.

"You want to dock here?" The voice sounded incredulous.

"Very much so, yes," Sam said.

After a long pause, the voice directed them to dock, "wherever they found room" which was a little disconcerting.

There were plenty of open docking ports to choose from. What followed was the sort of docking procedure that he'd had to practice at the Academy but never thought he'd actually use. They had to pull out the universal docking adapter. Fortunately the docking gear hadn't been damaged. Otherwise they'd have needed to go EVA to install it, and as it was Sam was half-convinced Taurik was never going to talk to him again after this. The primary UDA couldn't get a good seal, and deployed a secondary, even more adaptable and less convenient docking apparatus. They had to extend a flexi-tube, which meant that when they finally had a seal, they were faced with a two meter journey through a transparent zero-G tube.

He wished they'd just beamed aboard, but Taurik only had 87.5 percent confidence in the transporter, which was a little low given Sam's general preference for not becoming one with a bulkhead.

"No welcome party?" Sam asked, as they passed through the inner airlock door and onto the station proper. Given that it seemed evident that very few people came here, he'd have thought newcomers would warrant some sort of greeting. 

Sam tapped his commbadge. They had linked their badges to the shuttle's subspace relay, although realistically if things went bad, the only thing _Enterprise_ was going to be able to do was listen to them die. "Lavelle to Enterprise."

It was Vreena's voice that greeted him. Gamma shift.

"This is Lavelle and Taurik checking in. We've arrived on White Star station. Since we're here, we're going to go exploring."

"Acknowledged," Vreena said. "Try not to die while I'm on duty."

"We'll do our best."

They'd used the sensor data to create a map of the station, and fed it into their tricorders so it was easy enough to make it to the inhabited part of the station. The corridors they passed through were dimly lit. There were stores, hundreds of them, some still with elaborate designs in the windows, but clearly abandoned. The station was quiet except for the whir of air coming through vents and a faint mechanical hum.

Something ran across their path. Sam jumped and pulled out his phaser. Taurik looked at his tricorder. "Cardassian vole."

Sam put his phaser away. "On this side of the quadrant?"

"They are a remarkably adaptable species."

They made their way to a central promenade. The promenade was three levels, but the lights were off on the bottom level. Sam looked over the railing into the dark below. "I played this holo once. Everyone except the cat dies in the end."

Taurik gave him the _Humans, honestly_ look that Sam assumed they taught in Vulcan primary school.

The finally met an actual person a few minutes later who directed them to the administrator's office. When they arrived, they found a woman sitting with her feet up on a metal desk watching a video screen on the far wall. It was playing some sort of colorful dance performance without sound. She looked Vulcan. Her hair was black, streaked with white. Her face looked hard. Weathered. Assuming she was Vulcan, she was probably nearing one hundred and fifty.

Taurik raised his hand in a formal Vulcan salute.

She glared at him. "Put your hand down, Yyaio. I am Rihan."

Sam's brain took a second to dredge up where he'd heard the word 'Rihan' before. "That means you're Romulan, right?"

The woman bared her teeth. "I am Rihan."

Sam didn't know enough about Romulan identity politics to have any idea what the distinction was, or why she looked so very Vulcan, but he decided it wasn't a conversation he wanted to pursue. "Are you in charge here?"

"More or less," she said. She dropped her feet to the floor and looked them both over. "What do you want?"

"My name is Lieutenant Sam Lavelle of the _USS Enterprise_ \--" Sam started. 

The woman's face shifted for a moment, became almost pained, and then hardened into impassivity. Sam paused for a second, hoping she didn't have some sort of history with the _Enterprise_ that was going to lead to them getting spaced, but she just made what he assumed was a 'hurry up' gesture.

"Our shuttle was damaged. Our ship is coming to get us, but we need to take refuge here for a day or two."

She raised an eyebrow. "Fine."

Taurik and Sam looked at each other. "That's it?" Sam asked.

She spread her hands. "Do you see me inundated with people? We don't see anyone except the occasional trading ship, and we are not lacking for room."

"Where can we find food and and shelter?" Taurik asked.

She pointed down. "Most everything is on the second level. There's a Ferengi down there that has the only working subspace radio on the station. He can link you to whatever currency you have back home, and give you credit cards for purchases. His fees are exorbitant, but he's all there is." She turned the video screen back on.

Taurik said, "If I may ask, our sensors detected approximately 2.7 thousand people on this station, but we have seen only thirty eight people since our arrival. Is there a reason for this discrepancy?"

"It's a big station, and there's a lot of room to spread out. At any given time, most people are in the outer sections, scavenging."

"Is there anything valuable out there?"

"Not much, but enough to sell to passing traders and keep up some semblance of an economy, no matter how pathetic." She put her feet on the desk and turned her attention back to the video screen. "Now go away. I want to see if my team made it to the next round."

They made their way to the currency station. It wasn't hard to set up a Starfleet tab. The clerk enclosed in the forcefield asked for their Starfleet ID numbers, and they pressed their thumbs to an ident pad. The subspace linkup seemed to take an age, but eventually two credit cards popped out of the booth. With them, they could buy almost anything they wanted and, since they were technically in duress, Starfleet would foot the bill. The record of their purchases would eventually end up in the hands of Starfleet's accounting department which was notoriously disapproving of unnecessary purchases, and it was a bad idea to abuse the system. Sam wouldn't have anyway. He had been raised to respect public resources with an almost religious zeal.

They went in search of a decent meal, and when that proved elusive, they settled on a food stand serving greasy looking soup. Sam peered into the bowl. "I think this might have meat in it," he said.

"It does," Taurik said. "It is probably vat-grown, and even if it is not, I need to eat."

Sam tucked into his soup. It wasn't the worst meal he'd ever had, but it came close. Taurik ate listlessly, pushing his food around and taking half-hearted bites every few minutes. Sam took a sip of what passed for beer on White Star--it was unsurprisingly terrible, but he trusted alcohol here a lot more than he trusted the water.

He watched the pedestrians walk by. Most were humanoid, but Sam didn't recognize all of the species. He spotted a Ferengi, two Humans...an Aldovian? That particular insectoid species hated, well, everyone and was rarely seen off of its home planet.

"So what's going on with you?" he asked, after a few minutes of this.

Taurik frowned into his soup. "I am--"

"No, you're not," Sam said. "I've known you for--what? Almost two years? There's something bothering you."

"Earlier today we were chased, shot at, nearly killed, and now have to come here--" he gestured around at the less than cheery surroundings "--to await rescue."

"Yeah, but all of that in and of itself isn't enough to throw you off balance like this." He looked around and dropped his voice. "Is this that...thing?"

Taurik turned to stare at him. "What thing?"

"You know...there are rumors about some...thing that happens to Vulcans. Makes them a little...you know..."

Taurik had resignation in his voice when he said, "Say what you mean to say, Lieutenant."

"Is this that weird Vulcan sex thing?" Sam rested his hand on Taurik's arm. "I'm not judging. It's just--"

Taurik reached down and removed Sam's hand. "This is not a weird Vulcan sex thing," he said, and Sam winced hearing the words repeated back to him. Before he could apologize, Taurik stood up, leaving his half-eaten soup on the counter. "I am going for a walk." His tone suggested that Sam would be wise not to follow.

Sam watched him go, not thrilled by the idea of him walking around by himself, but Taurik could take care of himself. Vulcans had a reputation--earned, for the most part--for being hard targets. Most people left them alone, unless they were prepared for the fight. Chances were that reputation had made it even to this isolated corner of the quadrant.

Sam ate a few more bites of soup, then gave up and set off in the opposite direction of Taurik, not wanting to accidentally run into him and make Taurik think he'd been following him. About an hour later, he found himself in a bar, watching some sports match on a video that went staticy every few minutes. Taurik walked in and took the seat next to him.

"I'm sorry," Sam said after he'd sat down. "What I said earlier was rude, and disrespectful. You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to."

Taurik ordered a beer of his own, grimacing a little at the taste but probably of the same opinion as Sam with regards to the water quality on White Star. He'd heard once that Vulcans didn't drink, but even as a kid he'd known that words like 'never' and 'every' were usually wrong when applied to an entire planet. He'd met Vulcans who turned their nose up at the mere mention of alcohol, and ones like Taurik who liked the occasional cocktail. 

They watched the sports match in silence. Sam didn't know the rules of the game, and didn't care enough to find out, but two teams were chasing a disk of some kind around a three-dimensional court. They were wearing rocket boots of all things, which meant it was from some part of the galaxy where rocket boots were still something other than hopelessly old fashioned. Or else the broadcast was on a light-speed radio signal, and actually was a hundred years old.

Taurik gestured for the bartender. When she came over, he asked, "Do you have Romulan ale?"

She glanced between the two of them, taking in the Starfleet uniforms. "Maybe..."

Taurik looked at Sam, who held up both hands. "My lips are sealed. But you can't put that on a Starfleet tab."

Taurik placed a slip of latinum on the bar. The bartender hesitated for a second more, then took it and returned with a glass of blue liquid.

"Where'd you get latinum?" Sam asked, gesturing for another beer. He'd gone down the Romulan ale route once. Never again.

"Like most planets in the Federation, Vulcan does not have the same...fraught history with money that Earth does. We do not have to disguise our earnings behind a convoluted credit system to assuage our egalitarianism. We have an internal currency, and bank accounts, and agreements for currency exchange with most economies in the quadrant."

"Huh." Sam had never really thought about it before, but he had been raised in a hard-line communist family where even credits were considered a necessary evil, and talking about money except to excoriate the old ways was in poor taste. "You have a private bank account?" That was the sort of thing he mostly associated with villains in children's books.

"I would not call it private. My entire family draws on the same funds."

That made more sense. Vulcan families were basically small governmental units made up of hundreds of people.

Taurik reached under his tunic and pulled off a necklace that Sam had never seen before. It was a thin chain, and attached to that, a triangular pendant. He turned the pendent over in his hands. "This is a token of my betrothal."

Sam was surprised. "Since when are you engaged?"

"Since I was seven years old." Taurik re-fastened the necklace and tucked it back under his tunic. He took a long drink of ale. He was quiet for a long time, and then said, "My brother is almost certainly dead."

Sam set his beer down on the bar. "I'm sorry."

"He was in Starfleet, like myself. His ship disappeared in the Badlands."

"He was on _Voyager_?" The news about _Voyager_ had come through about a week ago. No wonder Taurik had been tense.

"Yes." Taurik sipped his ale.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"No." He took a deep breath and released it slowly. "However, you are correct that of late I have not displayed equanimity of character."

"You just lost someone..."

"That is no excuse. I ask pardon."

Sam considered it was a perfectly valid excuse, but it seemed kinder not to argue. "Don't worry about it. I punched a few inanimate objects myself after we lost Sito. So...I get it."

"That loss was also grievous."

It still was, Sam thought, and way too fresh in his mind even months later.

Sam glanced at Taurik's glass, which was already mostly empty. There was no way he wasn't feeling that by now, but if he was drunk, he was hiding it well. He drained the last of his glass, and gestured to the bartender for another.

"That's maybe not the best idea," Sam said, but didn't push the issue when the bartender handed him a new glass. Taurik was an adult, and if he wanted to put his liver to the test, that was his decision.

They drank in silence until the game ended. Sam had no idea who won, but most of the bar broke out cheering.

Sam pushed his empty beer glass away. Taurik's second glass of ale was empty, and he had opened and dumped out several of the seasoning packets--Sam assumed they were salt--onto the bar and was using the scattered grains to draw what looked like Tran subspace diagrams.

Sam stood, feeling the alcohol in his system as he did. He wasn't much of a drinker, and the beers had given him a fuzzy, light-headed feeling. "Come on, my friend. Let's get you to bed." He hadn't really thought out where they would stay the night. The shuttle was an option, but not a good one. The only lodgings on White Star were sure to be dingy and miserable, but probably better than sleeping in the cramped bunks of the shuttle with broken environmental controls and a decent chance of CO2 poisoning if the connection to the station's air supply was interrupted for any reason.

Taurik stood up. He didn't stumble, but he bumped into the chair as soon as he started to walk. Sam looped an arm around his waist and guided him out of the bar.

"What do you do with a drunken Vulcan?" he muttered to himself.

They walked a little way down the promenade. Taurik shook off Sam's assistance, and managed to walk in a mostly straight line, but after about thirty meters, he stopped and sat down on a low bench. His face was flushed. "It is in fact real."

"What is?" Sam asked, sitting down next to him. His feet ached, and all he wanted to do was take his boots off and go to sleep right there.

"The weird Vulcan sex thing," Taurik said. "It is real."

Sam groaned. "You do not want to be telling me this. I promise you when you sober up, you are going to wish--"

"It is not like the rumors, not the ones that have reached me." He sat up, flushed darker, and swallowed hard. For a second, Sam thought he was going to throw up, but he didn't. He just leaned close and grabbed Sam's arm, not hard, but with a grip that Sam couldn't have gotten out of if he'd tried. His voice was barely more than whisper and full of intensity. "We lose our reason. We lose _ourselves_. In the end we become animals, we cannot speak, or think. It has not happened to me yet but it will, and I am afraid."

"Taurik, stop," Sam hissed. "You are going to regret this." He looked around to see if anyone had heard them, but there was no one around.

Taurik let go of his arm. "Five years. Statistically, I have no more than five years, and if I go as long as that, I will be in the long tail of the distribution curve." He covered his face with both hands. Sam looked at him, willing him not to start crying. Were Vulcans even physically capable of crying? In either case, he didn't. He let his hands fall back into his lap and stared down at them. "We are allowed a companion, to stand with us at our wedding. I always assumed my companion would be my brother...but my brother is dead."

What was there to say to that? Sam stretched his legs out in front of him and crossed them at the ankles. Taurik leaned forward and rested his forearms on his knees, staring down at the floor between his feet. A little further down the corridor, Sam could see what looked like the beginning of a fight, but before it could escalate, the Rihan woman from the administrator's office appeared out of nowhere and took them both down to the floor with a couple of impressive moves. The two fighters got slowly to their feet, apologized to the Rihan woman, and walked away.

More or less in charge. Right.

"I must once again ask pardon."

Sam shrugged, still watching the Rihan woman who, noticing him, gave a sardonic little bow. "You've got a lot on your mind right now."

"Nevertheless, I am sorry."

"Not as sorry as you're going to be in the morning."

Taurik made a sound that could have been a laugh. "You are probably correct."

Sam turned back to him. "For what it's worth, I'll stand with you at your wedding. If you want."

Taurik raised an eyebrow. "You may regret making that offer, if I decide to ask it of you."

"Maybe. You can ask anyway."

Taurik looked away. "We should find lodgings."

"Are you ready to get up?"

"I would prefer to sit a while longer."

"Well, then, let's just sit."

**Author's Note:**

> Per the [English-Romulan Dictionary](http://www.rihan.org/drupal/dictionary/a), Yyaio is a slang/offensive word for Vulcan. The Rihannsu novels by Diane Duane are the basis for the brief appearance of the Rihan woman. (In my head, she's Ael's niece/the Romulan Commander from the Enterprise Incident, but the author dies with the last word of the story, so you do you.) If you haven't read Duane's ST novels, you're missing out.
> 
>  
> 
> [What _do_ you do with a drunken Vulcan?](http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/fcoppa/clips/what-do-you-do-with-a-drunken-vulcan/embed_view)


End file.
